by P. D. James
Some novelists have taken pains to emphasize that they don’t draw directly from life, almost as if they find the accusation demeaning. Charlotte Brontë, writing to Ellen Nussey in 1849, protested that she was not to suppose any of the characters in Shirley was intended as a literal portrait. “It would not suit the rules of art, nor of my own feelings, to write in that style. We only suffer reality to suggest, never to dictate.” This is a subtle but, I think, a valid distinction. George Eliot, in a letter ten years later, claimed that there was “not a single portrait in Adam Bede … The whole course of the story, the descriptions of scenery and houses, the characters and dialogue, everything is a combination from widely sundered elements of experience.” Gustave Flaubert wrote that there was nothing true in Madame Bovary. “It is a story of pure invention: I have put none of my own feelings into it, nor anything of my own life. The illusion, on the contrary (if there is any), comes from the very objectivity of the work.” But it is difficult to believe that Flaubert had not at some time encountered a Madame Bovary or someone very like her.
Certainly I find it difficult to believe that any successful fictional character has been created which did not catch the first flicker of life from the burning coal of a living person. That person may very well, of course, be the author himself, and frequently is. We may not always have access to the pain, joy, disgust, embarrassment, remorse of other people—how can we have?—but our own emotions, our own pains and joys, are always available to us. These, remembered, and relived, sometimes with discomfort, and filtered through the imagination become the raw stuff of fiction.
Once the main emotive thrust is established—the essentials of character, the formative experiences of childhood and the vicissitudes of adult life—then, for me, a character takes root in my mind and is able to grow and develop. But the character never really comes alive until I begin writing. Then it feels to me as if the character and his whole story already exist in some limbo of my imagination and that what I am doing is getting in touch with a living person and putting his story down in black and white, a process less of creation than of revelation. And during the writing the character will reveal himself or herself more clearly, will display unexpected quirks of personality and will sometimes act in a way I neither planned nor expected. For in my kind of fiction, of course, no character can completely escape his author. I can’t have a murderer deciding that he would prefer to be an innocent suspect. When I am asked if my characters do occasionally take control, I have to reply that their freedom is necessarily limited, but because they change and develop as the manuscript lengthens, I never get exactly the novel I was so carefully planning.
Real people reveal themselves and are revealed by what they do, what they say, what they think and by what other people say and think about them. So it is with characters in fiction. I was interested when I read—I can’t remember where—how Evelyn Waugh responded to a reader who pointed out that he never describes what his characters are thinking. He said, “I don’t know what they’re thinking, I only know what they do.” This is the opposite of the stream-of-consciousness revelation of character, the Molly Bloom soliloquy in Ulysses being one of the best examples. Character can also be revealed through setting, through the personal choice of what to wear, the outward appearance we present to the world, the objects with which we choose to surround ourselves. It is possible in a novel to describe a room, books, pictures, ornaments, or a bare uncluttered, functional space and immediately bring the owner to life, an example of the interdependence of all the elements in a novel. We are always two people: the essential self, perhaps never fully known, and the carefully constructed carapace which protects that self and becomes the person we present to the world.
For me, one of the fascinations of detective fiction is the exploration of character under the revealing trauma of a murder enquiry. Murder is the unique crime, the only one for which we can never make reparation to the victim. Murder destroys privacy, both of the living and of the dead. It forces us to confront what we are and what we are capable of being. No wonder it has fascinated writers and readers since Cain murdered Abel.
WEDNESDAY, 5TH NOVEMBER
To lunch at Penguin’s offices off Kensington High Street, where we discussed plans for the promotion of the mass-market edition of A Certain Justice. Then at 4:30 Michele Buck and Tim Vaughan from Anglia (now United Film and Television Productions) called to talk about the television version of the book.
It was on this day, 5th November, in 1989, when I first went to Czechoslovakia for a nine-day visit on behalf of the British Council, of which I was a member from 1988 to 1993. It was my first excursion behind the Iron Curtain except for a day’s visit to East Berlin when I was in Berlin in 1986, again for the British Council. The hotel in Prague was comfortable and modernized, but the service surly. I had a translator constantly with me and on the first morning was due to meet a journalist in the foyer of the hotel. Before she arrived, my translator suggested we should have coffee at the bar. So we perched on two high stools where my interviewer eventually joined us. I offered her coffee and suggested that we should now take our cups to the comfortable chairs around one of the low tables, since it was hardly practicable to conduct an interview while seated in a line at the bar.
My translator at once demurred. “It is not allowed,” she said. “Coffee is at the bar only.” I said that I, as a guest of the hotel, had paid for the coffee and could see no reason why we should not drink it at one of the tables. I was perfectly prepared to carry the cups back to the bar afterwards. So we went to the table but my translator was obviously not at ease. A few minutes later she broke off her translation to say, “You are right. You are a guest in this hotel. Why can’t we have coffee at this table?” I replied that she should stay close to my side, as she intended, and by the end of my visit would no doubt be as bloody-minded as a Briton.
Everywhere I sensed this sensitivity to what was or was not allowed. A small television crew with one camera came to make a film about me, part of which was shot outside the Cathedral. It was bitterly cold and afterwards I suggested that they should come back with me to the hotel for coffee or a drink. Only the director spoke English and he said that this would not be possible. The hotel was for rich foreigners and those who had foreign exchange. I persuaded them to come back and I think they enjoyed the coffee, but they were not at ease.
Everywhere there was a sense of impending change. The roads were lined with the tinny-looking cars of East Germans who had come over the border. The dominoes were tumbling and although I saw on every wall, particularly in the schools where I spoke, a large framed photograph of the President, Gustáv Husák, I felt I was not the only person present who was wondering how long it would hang there.
The school visits were disappointing. The young people sat in attentive silence and all, as far as I could judge, seemed interested in what I told them about the craft of the detective story and what was happening in English literature. But at question time they were absolutely silent. This was in such marked contrast from my experience of lively, questioning young audiences in Germany, Italy or Spain, let alone English-speaking countries, that I asked the reason. The staff said pupils were not encouraged ever to question what they had been told and a period of questions and discussion would be alien to their culture.
I spent one evening speaking to an officially recognized organization of writers. They told me that the state was generous to writers and that there was a beautiful residential centre in which they could stay without payment when writing their books. I asked whether a Czech whose books were critical of the government would also be able to enjoy this privilege. There was a silence and then one of the writers replied no. The evening was curious, the air heavy with questions unasked and the knowledge that life was about to change fundamentally and perhaps in directions no one could foresee.
I was driven to Slovakia by a British Council driver through a landscape of fir trees which reminded me of the novels of John le C
arré, and of an early scene from the BBC production of Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy where the British agent is betrayed and shot. I almost expected to hear the crackle of gunfire and see the solitary figure dodging among the trees.
We stopped on the way for coffee and the driver spoke about communism and the acknowledgement of and apology for past mistakes recently made in Russia. Looking across the table I saw that he was close to tears. He broke out vehemently: “Thousands were killed, thousands have no jobs, no hope, thousands are in prison. And now they say, ‘Was a mistake’!”
When I lived in Cambridge in the early days of the war I met a Czechoslovak airman and we would go dancing together on Saturday nights at the pretentiously named McGrath Ballroom, one of the regular Cambridge haunts of air crews based on airfields near the city. He was tall and exceptionally good-looking, but the relationship, which never really grew beyond a romantic friendship, was hampered because we could only communicate in rather poor French. He gave me a very beautiful cameo ring which, to my lasting regret, I lost sometime during the war. He had a passionate hatred of Germans. When I enquired whether he was a bomber or a fighter pilot, he growled, “Je suis chasseur!,” as if it were a battle cry. This vehemence was in contrast to the British fighter pilots I knew who took a matter-of-fact attitude to the task in hand, showing little hatred of the enemy with whom they shared the same dangerous skies. We were due to meet at the ballroom in January 1941 but my Czech didn’t arrive, and I knew none of his fellow Czech pilots from whom I could enquire.
When I was in Prague my publishers told me that the Czechs who had fought for the allies and survived were subsequently ostracized. Professional men lost their jobs and most were denied civil liberties. But he said that the climate was now changing and that his firm had produced a book with pictures and records of those who had flown in the Free Czech Air Force. He gave me a copy, and I recognized my Czechoslovak pilot. There was a cross and a date in January 1941 beside his name, confirming what I already knew.
THURSDAY, 6TH NOVEMBER
This is the time of year when all the main literary editors of the broadsheets telephone and ask what books I have most enjoyed during the year. It is a curious exercise affording some readers the chance to give a plug to their friends while others choose extraordinarily erudite volumes which it is hard to believe they have actually read for pleasure.
It has been a particularly good year for biographies, which I now read and enjoy far more than fiction. I still have much reading pleasure in store, but, of those I have finished, I greatly enjoyed and have named Claire Tomalin’s sensitive and elegantly written Jane Austen: A Life, and Jenny Uglow’s Hogarth: A Life and a World, an absorbing study of a great artist and his age. Iain Pears’s unmemorably named An Instance of the Fingerpost is a fictional tour de force set in Oxford in the 1660s which combines erudition with mystery. But the novel I most admired this year is Enduring Love by Ian McEwan; the brilliant first chapter alone should have assured it a place on the Booker shortlist. It doesn’t altogether fulfil this promise and it isn’t a comfortable novel, but it would be interesting to know why the judges rejected it.
THURSDAY, 13TH NOVEMBER
I am writing this in my room at the Waldorf Astoria at the end of the QE2 cruise which began on Friday, 7th November. This was my third trip as a guest lecturer and by far the most enjoyable. The QE2 is a ship which needs getting used to; at first too much like a floating hotel to provide what I love, a sense of being at sea. But now I know my way around and have begun to understand the affection which regular travellers obviously feel. Some of them cross the Atlantic by no other way, taking the same cabin, meeting the same people, and speaking knowledgeably about their favourite captains.
This time I persuaded Rosemary to come with me, the perfect travelling companion since she is invariably good-humoured, relishes the variety, challenge and drollery of new experience and can be relied upon to be stalwart in an emergency. Her broken wrist is still in plaster, and the official photograph taken of us coming aboard has caught her, arm in sling, with a momentary look of submissive depression, with me at her side, twice as large, ruddy-faced and beaming. The only appropriate caption would be “Murderess and her victim come aboard!”
The trip was memorable for the storm which began on Saturday. We were warned that the weather would worsen, and it did so spectacularly. Rosemary and I took our sea-sickness pills, which were effective, but a row of cabins had their “Do not disturb” signs on the doors all day, and the Queen’s Grill, where we had our table, had more empty places than passengers. One of the waiters told me that a member of the crew in their quarters had become extremely unpopular by showing The Poseidon Adventure on video. It was difficult at times to keep upright and the captain broadcast to us that the open deck was prohibited. Before this announcement Rosemary and I, desperate for sea air, had tried to force open one of the doors on the boat deck, but immediately had to clutch each other to avoid being hurled across the deck.
But it was worth putting up with inconvenience to see the Atlantic in a storm. As far as we could see the ocean had solidified and become a heaving mountain range of granite and rock, violently restless and yet intimidatingly dense and impervious. As far as the horizon the great grey ridges reared themselves up, valleys widened and became chasms, and volcano after volcano rose with majestic slowness to erupt, not with bursts of fire, but with explosions of spume. Outside our cabin window we watched the ocean rising in shining curves of grey mottled with white which disintegrated with a sound like gunfire and flung spray against the glass. On Saturday night a particularly large wave must have shaken the ship, the sound something between a crack and an explosion. Our clothes were wrenched from the hangers and flung across the floor while bottles and glasses skidded and broke, and the chairs spun and crashed against the cabin wall. It was extraordinary to think that a ship the size of the QE2, 70,000 tons in weight, thirteen storeys high and a half-mile walk round the decks, could be so shaken.
But by Sunday night the storm had eased and on Monday midday a fitful sun was shining on a calm purple-blue ocean and we were able to sit and read on deck. When the QE2 finally goes out of service, I wonder how many regular sea crossings of the Atlantic there will be and how many passengers will be able to experience the tumultuous power of the Atlantic in a gale.
We found we were to share our table, always at first a depressing prospect. But the two passengers—Donald and Renée Bain—were delightful, entertaining and companionable Americans. Donald, among his varied literary achievements—he is the author of the Murder, She Wrote series—writes books for celebrities who want to be published authors without the actual bother of having to write themselves. He was extremely discreet about his clients, but I can see the attraction. The book sells on the celebrity’s name and the writer collects 50 percent of the royalties. But it is not without its disadvantages, particularly when the celebrity draws a languid hand across his or her brow and complains that the emotional stress of creative writing, not to mention the publicity, is becoming too much. Under Don’s guidance I threw craps in the casino, the first time I have ever gambled. I limited myself to $100 and left the table with $198. Rosemary played the one-armed bandits until I confiscated all her quarters.
The arrival in New York down the Hudson was as spectacular as ever. One should always arrive in great cities by sea or river. As we managed our own luggage we were able to disembark early and, despite pouring rain, set off to check in at the Waldorf Astoria and then to the Frick and the Metropolitan Museum. Rosemary will have a day in New York before flying back to London tomorrow, while I go on to a Canadian tour.
FRIDAY, 21ST NOVEMBER
It is 9:30 p.m. and I am seated on Air Canada flight 96 for London Heathrow after a successful, if tiring, Canadian tour.
On Friday 14th I arrived very late in Toronto and was met by Pat Cairns, one of the publicity directors, and taken to the Four Seasons Hotel. Next day, Saturday, my Canadian publisher, Louise Dennys, ga
ve a celebration party at her Toronto apartment. Louise is a remarkable woman, beautiful, intelligent and kind, and I value her both as my Canadian publisher and as a friend. The party was due to last for two hours, but went on considerably longer and I was introduced in swift succession to one Toronto celebrity after another. Although I was comfortably seated while this went on, the noise level and the effort of responding to each new personality were inevitably tiring.
At the dinner afterwards, one of the guests, an eminent woman lawyer, inveighed passionately against the dominance of the legal profession in England by male barristers and the prejudice and hostility shown to women at the Bar. She instanced Helena Kennedy and the unfairness with which, she alleged, this particular lawyer had had to contend. I was tempted to point out that the brilliant Helena Kennedy had, in the end, done rather well for herself. I am always irritated by criticism of England when I am abroad and I tried to point out that women were entering the law in greater numbers and that, although I obviously had no personal knowledge, I believed that things were improving. However, as the diatribe continued, I found myself saying tartly that I was becoming tired of women presenting themselves as victims.
